epistemology

Intelligences

The Climate Crisis as Learning Space

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Figure 1. Photo showing totems such as figurines of a fly, a gecko, a petrified stone, a dish with a mermaid, and a tile with a centaur.
FLOOR BASTEN Independent Scholar MARC COENDERS Independent Scholar DOWNLOAD PDF It is becoming widely accepted that the climate crisis is a multiscale breakdown of interrelated ecological systems, caused by behavioural patterns that are unsustainable. As behaviours are largely informed by ideologies and as the latter are passed on by education, we submit that the climate crisis is also a crisis of learning. Our game invites participants to reflect on a variety of ways of human thinking and sensemaking, i.e. paradigms. Putting the so-called Western paradigm into perspective by presenting other ontologies and epistemologies, we challenge participants to rethink learning as situated against the backdrop of new insights into the nature of ‘situation’, an intra-emergent phenomenon in which humans and other-than-humans are agentically enmeshed (Barad, 2007). Context Societies worldwide are responsible for unsustainable lifestyles. When we trace how we got to this, we see a history in which antique Greeks’ speculations about...

Intelligences

Theory Instruments as Tangible Ways of Knowing

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Presentation slide: Title is "Actor-Network Rings". Hows a wooden ball inside a wooden ring with clothespins attached to the ring. Text" Actor Network Theory: Highlights the complex networked relations of people and things that make up our socio-material worlds. This instrument brings attention to what humans and non-human accomplish together." Citation" Latour, B. 1982. Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts, in" Shaping Technology/Building Socity (eds) W.E. Bijker and U. Law. Cambridge: MIT Press.
JESSICA SORENSON Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark METTE GISLEV KJÆRSGAARD Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark JACOB BUUR Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark MARY KARYDA Department of Sociology and Environmental Economics, University of Southern Denmark AYŞE ÖZGE AĞÇA Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary design praxis. In a series of design research experiments, we have taken a pragmatic and playful approach to physicalizing theory. The result is a set of ‘Theory Instruments’ that transform theory into tangible interaction. Theory Instruments scaffold knowledge production by encouraging new ways of seeing organizations, products, users, and the relations between them....

Intelligences

How a Government Organisation Evolved to Embrace Ethnographic Methods for Service (and Team) Resilience: The Case of the Canadian Digital Service

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Presentation slide: photograph of a diverse group of people waiting outside a building with a "Service Canada sign", most are wearing masks.
MITHULA NAIK Canadian Digital Service, Treasury Board Secretariat, Government of Canada COLIN MACARTHUR Universita’ Bocconi Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes a government digital team built from the ground up to embrace ethnographic methods to make government services more resilient. The case study begins by tracing the organisation’s origins and relationship to other research-driven parts of its government. Then it shows how the organisation’s structure evolved as more projects included ethnography. It describes various approaches to locating skilled researchers within bureaucratic confines, as well as what responsibilities researchers took on as the organisation grew. It then summarises researchers’ experiences with matrixed, functional and hybrid organisation schemes. The case study concludes explaining how embracing ethnographic approaches...

Intelligences

Beyond Representation: Using Infrastructure Studies to Reframe Ethnographic Agendas and Outcomes

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Still image of Karl Mendonca presenting at EPIC2022
KARL MENDONCA Google The ethos and methods of participatory research have been widely embraced as a powerful approach to address systemic inequity in the design of technology. While there have been many gains and developments that merit celebration, an unspoken, prevalent assumption is that inclusive forms of engagement will unequivocally result in a more inclusive product. Using the case study of an ethnographic project, this paper critically examines how the task of producing “better” (more ethical, more participatory, more statistically diverse) representations, had the unintended consequence of displacing structural outcomes to questions of aesthetics and statistical sampling. An investigation into the cause of this displacement reveals the resilience of deeper historical biases that persist from the early years of electronic computing. As a possible remedial framework, this paper introduces the field of infrastructure studies, which makes an explicit connection between the material, historical and semiotic dimensions...

Intelligences

Creating Future Imaginaries through Indigenous AI

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Creating Future Imaginaries through Indigenous AI
Keynote Speaker: JASON LEWIS, Concordia University Jason Edward Lewis' multidisciplinary research and creative practice has been central to developing Indigenous media art in North America and worldwide, establishing a vital conversation about the interaction between Indigenous culture and computational technology. His contributions comprise scholarly writing, art making and technology research, as well as his leadership of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and his creation of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. A digital media theorist, poet, and software designer, Lewis is currently University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary and Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. At Concordia he also serves as Special Advisor to the Provost on Indigenous Spaces. Lewis spent a decade working in a range of industrial research settings, including Interval Research, US West's Advanced Technology Group, and the Institute for Research on Learning, and, at the turn of...

Intelligences

Intuition: Thinking through Loopholes

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LAURA REISS PechaKucha Presentation Intuition, contrary to common sense, is not a natural gift. Intuition is born out of experience and it can be a valuable tool for researchers. But what has intuition to do with anticipation? To anticipate we usually rely on understanding current behavioral patterns and extrapolating them. Intuition is great at recognizing patterns and by trusting it more we can become even better researchers. As with any other skill in order to follow our intuition, we need to practice, to be exposed to a lot of fieldwork, to listen to a lot of people, so that we can not only notice what stands out of the common but give the right value to it. When we learn to use our intuition as a research tool, anticipating becomes natural. I will bring examples from a research project that aimed to explore the relationship of young women in Brazil with pregnancy and the most valuable insight in this project came from a girl who did not get pregnant. I will also draw from the world of chess—a game where anticipation...

Intelligences

Who Deserves to Be Observed?: Wrestling with the Avant-Garde

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LETIZIA NARDI InProcess LOLA BILLAUD InProcess PechaKucha Presentation—What happens when the “mildly militaristic jargon of marketing” (2004, Sunderland, Taylor, Denny) seeps into the dialectic process of structuring applied research and blurs the meaning of its stakes? This provokingly titled PechaKucha stems from our experience of recruitment conundrums, ones in which notions of “avant-garde” were used in framing, shaping, or reorienting our approach towards the people we were supposed to observe, analyze and report on. We resurface from these case studies and attempt to scratch the glossy coat that blankets these notions as we approach the range of theories that try to define who’s “deserving” of observation. We point at their implications, revealing the power dynamics that they inevitably create, within and outside the field. Inspired by Escobar’s call for non-modern solutions to the stakes of the modern world (2017, Escobar) we reflect on how to make our epistemological choices count in the future...

Perspectives

The Power of Not Thinking

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book cover, "The Power of Not Thinking"
a book review by GERALD LOMBARDI The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them Simon Roberts 2020, 336 pp, Blink Publishing/Bonnier In The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them, Simon Roberts aims to resuscitate the human body from the sepulchre of Western thought, where Descartes and his successors presumably buried it, and to correct popular misconceptions about how we generate knowledge. In the author's words: "Our intelligence does not just arise from our brains... nor can it be programmed as a set of rules or propositions that enables us to think in particular ways or perform particular actions. Instead, our understanding of the world arises from our bodies’ interactions with and perceptions of the world – and it is through these interactions that our bodies acquire knowledge." (p. 6) This proposition will be taken for granted by some readers of this review, and by anyone who follows its intellectual touchpoints: embodied cognition, situated learning,...

Intelligences

Human-Centered Data Science: A New Paradigm for Industrial IoT

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MATTHEW YAPCHAIAN Uptake Few professions appear more at odds, at least on the surface, than ethnography and data science. The first deals in qualitative “truths,” gleaned by human researchers, based on careful, deep observation of only a small number of human subjects, typically. The latter deals in quantitative “truths,” mined through computer-executed algorithms, based on vast swaths of anonymous data points. To the ethnographer, “truth” involves an understanding of how and why things are truly the way they are. To the data scientist, “truth” is more about designing algorithms that make guesses that are empirically correct a good portion of the time. Data science driven products, like those that Uptake builds, are most powerful and functional when they leverage the core strengths of both data science and ethnographic insights: what we call Human-Centered Data Science. I will argue that data science, including the collection and manipulation of data, is a practice that is in many ways as human-centered and subjective...

Intelligences

Who and What Drives Algorithm Development: Ethnographic Study of AI Start-up Organizational Formation

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RODNEY SAPPINGTON Founder, CEO, Acesio Inc. LAIMA SERKSNYTE Head of Behavioral and Organizational Research, Acesio Inc. The focus of this paper is to investigate deep learning algorithm development in an early stage start-up in which edges of knowledge formation and organizational formation were unsettled and contested. We use a debate by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss to examine these contested computational forms of knowledge through a contemporary lens. We set out to explore these epistemological edges as they shift over time and as they have real practical implications in how expertise and people are valued as useful or non-useful, integrated or rejected by the practice of deep learning algorithm R&D. We discuss the nuances of epistemic silences and acknowledgments of domain knowledge and universalizing machine learning knowledge in an organization that was rapidly attempting to develop algorithms for diagnostic insights. We conclude with reflections on how an AI-Inflected Ethnography perspective...

Intelligences

Cooperation without Submission: Some Insights on Knowing, Not-Knowing and Their Relations from Hopi-US Engagements

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JUSTIN B. RICHLAND Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine; Faculty Fellow, American Bar Foundation; Associate Justice, The Hopi Appellate Court EPIC2018 Keynote Address...

Perspectives

Book Review: The Paradox of Sensemaking

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by TOM HOY, Stripe Partners Sensemaking: The Power of Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm Christian Madsbjerg 2017, 240 pp, Hachette Books Excerpt Christian Madsbjerg has done a huge amount to elevate the profile and impact of ethnography in corporate settings. As co-founder of ReD Associates, Madsbjerg makes a consistent and compelling case for ethnographers to set their sights beyond user experience and design to impact decisions at the pinnacle of global organisations. His new book Sensemaking advances his mission further, advocating humanities-based thinking to a much wider business audience. The central analysis feels more even resonant today than when the book was released last year: the power of big data has created a false idol, lulling us into the belief that the algorithm has the capacity to replace critical thinking. What unfolds is a story which is compelling and bold in critique, but strangely conservative and ambiguous in the solutions it prescribes. Silicon Valley and the Renaissance Man [sic] Sensemaking...

Intelligences

<Place Label Here> Our Use of Labels at Work

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DANIELA CUARON Empathy NIK JARVIE-WALDROM Empathy PechaKucha Presentation—A label can be accurate and inadequate at the same time. A fish is a fish, but it's also a sea-dwelling, scale-covered, egg-laying, underwater-breathing creature. Many of us believe in the power of words to change the way we think about something. But are we always aware of how the labels we use influence our perspective? We're on a mission to better understand how, when, and why people use labels at work. We come across labels in project briefs, some emerge during fieldwork, and then there are labels we use to define what we do. We use them to communicate and refocus, but they also restrict our thinking. Through participation, observation and conversation, we've reflected on how labels can help us and hold us back. Daniela Cuaron is Empathy's research and strategy lead. She applies anthropological research with purpose to create meaningful strategies. Dani's work sees her striving to understand and address people's unmet needs. dani@empathydesign.com Nik...

Intelligences

The Ethnographer’s Spyglass: Insights and Distortions from Remote Usability Testing

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CHRISTOPHER A. GOLIAS American Eagle Outfitters This paper examines the cultural counter-flow between ethnography and remote usability testing, specifically what such tools might offer ethnographic practice. I explore how remote usability testing can both extend and delimit ethnographers’ sight lines. Because remote testing has a narrow aperture, long sight line, poor context and quick turnaround, I invoke the metaphor of a spyglass in the hands of the ethnographer to understand this increasingly available digital research method. Remote usability testing can quickly access insights and novel footings, while simultaneously creating myopic, distorted or biased understandings. Theoretically, the history of usability studies is compared to that of archaeology as it transitioned from a cultural product focus to a context focus. Practically, several workflows are presented that use the strengths of ethnography and remote usability testing to enhance one another. Finally, ethnography is discussed as a craft-like competence, rather...

Perspectives

The Virtues of the Visceral

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Soldiers check papers and take valuables at the checkpoint at A Day in the Life of a Refugee.
by SIMON ROBERTS, Stripe Partners The news on BBC Radio this morning: The Syrian crisis enters its seventh year with 400,000 dead and little hope that this complex catastrophe will be untangled any time soon. The scale of suffering is huge, but Syria accounts for just a fraction of an even more staggering number – the UNHCR estimates there are 65 million refugees or internally displaced people worldwide. Like many others I watch the steady stream of grisly news from Syria – it comes to us in facts, figures, infographics, human stories and historical comparisons. I've been shocked. But I am also inoculated. Whatever the quality of the reporting, however harrowing the scenes, our attention moves on. It is difficult to truly grasp the scale of what we have seen, hard to understand what it must be like to be a refugee. In an age when a seemingly limitless amount of information is at our fingertips, when we can know more than ever about events around the world, we still fail to understand. Here’s the challenge of contemporary...